Since the end of the 2013 season, I have been compiling data about how teams change their roster between seasons. While the main part of that effort is still ongoing, I’d like to share some of what I’ve put together so far.Continue reading Plotting Roster Turnover

Welcome, everyone, to the Massive Report Data blog. This is the platform I will use to discuss the methods and meta-issues behind the data stored on this site.

This is not the place to find analysis of the Crew, the players, or any of the content of the parent site. All of that coverage will be over on Massive Report, where a slew of talented writers strive to give blanket coverage to the team, the league, and the sport.

So, what will you find here? The process of working with this data is interesting to me, above and beyond (and occasionally more than) the soccer itself. Over the course of my following soccer I have progressed from keeping track of players in a Word document, through an Access database, and now to a MySQL database. I’ve built application layers in Access, ASP, ColdFusion and PHP. I’ve put visualizations together using Excel, Processing, and a variety of javascript libraries.

More recently, I have begun to study data analysis as a subject in its own right. Most recently I’ve taken two differentcourses on via Coursera, which has introduced me to R, and concepts ranging from hierarchical clustering to multi-variable regression.

These are the sorts of things I expect to cover in this space. As should be blindingly clear, none of this belongs on the Massive Report network.

If you are a like-minded geek, welcome – even if you have no interest in soccer.